Politics

Category archives for Politics

You may have read elsewhere that publishing giant Reed Elsevier has been caught copying Mike Dunford’s content without permission (and copyrighting it as their own!), which is extremely hypocritical from a company that opposes the open access movement and makes huge profits from restricting access to scientific data. I”m not going to discuss the matter…

Regular readers will know that I rarely write about politics. But this post is an exception, as it is written in memory of my father, who died on this day 7 years ago. That’s my father on the left, with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who died almost exactly four years later.

A new survey, released today by the ORB polling agency, suggests that around 1.2 million Iraqi civilians have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003. That’s more than 4% of the country’s population.

ABC News has posted a transcript of Osama bin Laden’s videotaped statement, in which he refers to Noam Chomsky as “among the most capable” of commentators on the Iraq war. And in a Mind Hacks exclusive, Vaughan has posted a deleted portion of the statement, in which bin Laden lays out his demands for psycholinguists.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the governmental body that regulates fertility treatments in the U.K., looks set to approve the use of hybrid embryos for stem cell research at a meeting later on today. Earlier this week, the HFEA published its public consultation on the subject. This revealed that, although many people found…

The Democratic presidential candidate answers questions about climate change, science education and health care, but there’s no mention of stem cells or of evolution/creationism. Nevertheless, it’s well worth reading both the interview and the comments.